Dickinson's Misery (2 page)

I
AM FORTUNATE
to have many people to acknowledge, and to be able to do so in print. The National Endowment for the Humanities, Princeton University, Boston University, New York University, and especially Rutgers University and the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture are institutional names for the support that has made this book possible. I am grateful to the Abraham and Rebecca Stein Faculty Publication Fund of New York University, Department of English, for a grant that subsidized the lavish number of illustrations in this book. The remarkable staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Boston Public Library, the American Antiquarian Society, Mount Holyoke College, the New York Historical Society, the Yale University Library, and particularly Daria D'Arienzo in Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College helped me to see what I needed to see, and helped me to figure out what it was I was seeing, and how to show some of it to others.

An early version of
chapter 3
appeared as “Dickinson's Figure of Address” in
Dickinson and Audience,
edited by Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996): 77–103; it is reprinted in expanded form by permission of the University of Michigan Press. A portion of
chapter 4
was previously published as “‘Faith in Anatomy': Reading Emily Dickinson” in
Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry,
edited by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997): 85–108; it is reprinted in altered and expanded form by permission of the editors and of Cornell University Press.

The Dickinson letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers from
The Letters of Emily Dickinson
, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Dickinson poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from the following volumes:
The Poems of Emily Dickinson,
Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College;
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition
, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

This book is about the people, objects, accidents, and institutions left out of lyrics as they are handed down, and since this book itself has taken so
many forms over the years, I wish I could account for all of the practical social relations that brought it into being. Instead, a few names will have to stand for many places and individuals even the longest list will inevitably omit. Many teachers and colleagues directly and indirectly enabled this project: David Bromwich, Robert Fagles, Stephen Yenser, Calvin Bedient, Shuhsi Kao, Douglass Fiero, Earl Miner, and A. Walton Litz may be surprised (if they are still surprisable) to find traces of their ways of thinking about poetry still evident here; Susan Mizruchi, Diana Henderson, April Alliston, Tomoko Masuzawa, Martha Nell Smith, Priscilla Wald, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Amy Kaplan, Beth Povinelli, Jonathan Goldberg, Emily Apter, Eliza Richards, Margaret Carr, Elizabeth Wingrove, Max Cavitch, Michael Moon, Robert Gibbs, Barbara Johnson, John Guillory, Lynn Wardley, Michael Cohen, Phillip Harper, Eric Santner, Una Chaudhuri, Nancy Ruttenburg, Mary Poovey, Patricia Crain, Jay Grossman, Diana Fuss, Eduardo Cadava, Lawrence Buell, and Tricia Lootens have each and all made contributions in different ways, at different times and in different places. Adela Pinch has inspired me, in person and in print. For several years, Mary Loeffelholz has been the best friend and smartest interlocutor anyone thinking about Dickinson could have. A late-breaking reading by Jonathan Culler made the ending stages of this book the beginning of a conversation. I thank Helen Tartar, the gifted editor to whom so many authors owe so much, for her support of this book. Mary Murrell deserves an award for her patience with and advocacy for this book; I hereby give it to her. I am very grateful to Jonathan Munk, editor and poet. I have been fortunate indeed in my readers, editors, and collaborators, and fortunate to have been part of a community of extraordinary readers and writers and talkers at Rutgers. This book owes its present form to conversations with Brent Edwards, Jonathan Kramnick, William Galperin, Harriet Davidson, Cheryl Wall, Colin Jager, George Levine, Jonah Siegel, Myra Jehlen, Barry Qualls, Elin Diamond, and Michael McKeon. Carolyn Williams can think one's own thoughts and twist them around her own faster than anyone I've ever met. Michael Warner's reading of these pages is so intimately a part of them now that his name should appear on the title page.

As companions for the life of the mind, no one could ask for better fellow travelers than Neni Panourgia and Stathis Gourgouris, exemplary souls. The spiritual and intellectual energy and generosity of Meredith McGill have sustained me within and without the walls of Rutgers; Andrew Parker's talents as someone to think with are well known. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Jennifer Whiting, Karsten Harries, and Elizabeth Langhorne have included me with surprising (and welcome) grace. In this paragraph I have begun the protocol of thanking my closest kin; my lovely
mother, Eunice Harris, my stepfather, William Harris, my sister, Julia Jackson, and brother Frank Valente have been marvels of patience and support over the years. They have given me the great gift of taking for granted what has often seemed to me a leap of faith; no writer of a book could ask for more. Then, as Stathis would say, there are those people who
are
my life: Most of all, this book reflects a deep and lifelong collaboration with Yopie Prins, who anticipated every word I wrote and spelled it back to me, letter by letter; the words I have to thank her she already knows. It also reflects and is reflected in two lives that have made it and my life infinitely richer than either would have been without them. I dedicate this book to Sadye and Walker Teiser because I promised, and because in their own ways they are the lyrical subjects that transcend it while their everyday lives have informed each word. Sadye inspires me daily to live up to her shining example; Walker challenges me to keep up with his. Finally, I wish that I had words to thank Martin Harries. He shares in this dedication, since he is the genius, the genie, the re-enchantment (though I know that he won't accept any of those words). To say that he has made this book and my life possible is not to say half enough; it's a good thing that the other half we don't have to say.

S
UPPOSE YOU ARE
sorting through the effects of a woman who has just died and you find in her bedroom a locked wooden box. You open the box and discover hundreds of folded sheets of stationery stitched together with string. Other papers in the bureau drawer are loose, or torn into small pieces, occasionally pinned together; there is writing on a guarantee issued by the German Student Lamp Co., on memo paper advertising
THE HOME INSURANCE CO. NEW YORK
(“Cash Assets, over
SIX MILLION DOLLARS
”), on many split-open envelopes, on a single strip three-quarters of an inch wide by twenty-one inches long, on thin bits of butcher paper, on a page inscribed “
Specimen of Penmanship
” (which is then crossed out) (
fig. 1
). There is writing clustered around a three-cent postage stamp of a steam engine turned on its side, which secures two magazine clippings bearing the names “
GEORGE SAND
” and “Mauprat.” Suppose that you recognize the twined pages as sets of
poems
; you decide that the other pages may contain poems as well. Now you wish you had kept the bundles of letters you burned upon the poet's (for it
was
a poet's) death. What remains, you decide, must be published.
¹

Let this exercise in supposing stand as some indication of what now, more than a century after the scene in which you have just been asked to place yourself, can and cannot be imagined about reading Emily Dickinson. What we cannot do is to return to a moment before Dickinson's work became literature, to discover within the everyday remnants of a literate life the destiny of print. Yet we are still faced with discerning, within the mass of print that has issued from that moment, what it was that Dickinson wrote. As many readers have noticed (or complained), the hermeneutic legacy of Dickinson's posthumous publication is also first of all a “sorting out”: so J. V. Cunningham remarked after what he diplomatically called “an authoritative diplomatic text” of Dickinson's extant corpus appeared for the first time in 1955, that “it is easier to hold in mind and sort out the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of George Eliot, for they have scope and structure.”
²
In the pages that follow, Cunningham's response will come to seem symptomatic of the century's ongoing attempt to construct the scope of Dickinson's work, to make out of the heterogeneous materials of her practice a literature “to hold in mind” and to hand down—to sort her various pages into various poems, those various poems into a book.

But what sort of book? The frustration of readers like Cunningham is also their invitation, for the syntax perceived as missing from the “almost 1,800 items in the collected poems” is theirs to supply. We might say of the range of Dickinson's texts considered together what Norman Bryson says of the objects in trompe l'oeil painting, that they may “present themselves as outside the orbit of human awareness, as unorganised by human attention, or as abandoned by human attention, or as endlessly awaiting it.”
³
Yet of course what this comparison to painting suggests is that such an effect is just that: Dickinson's “items” have been successively and carefully framed to give the impression that something, or someone, is missing. While the recovery of Dickinson's manuscripts may be supposed to have depended on the death of the subject, on the person who had, by accident or design, composed the scene, the repeated belated “discovery” that her work is yet in need of sorting (and of reading) may also depend upon the absence of the objects that composed it. These objects themselves mark not only the absence of the person who touched them but the presence of what touched that person: of the stationer that made the paper, of the manufacturer and printer and corporation that issued guarantees and advertisements and of the money that changed hands, of the butcher who wrapped the parcel, of the manuals and primers and copybooks that composed individual literacy, of the expanding postal service, of the modern railroad, of modern journalism, of the nineteenth-century taste for continental literary imports. All of these things are the sorts of things left out of a book, since the stories to be told about them open out away from the narrative of individual creation or individual reception supposed by my first paragraph. This is to say that what is so often said of the grammatical and rhetorical structure of Dickinson's poems—that, as critics have variously put it, the poetry is “sceneless,” is “a set of riddles” revolving around an “omitted center,” is a poetry of “revoked … referentiality”—can more aptly be said of the representation of the poems as such.
⁴
Once gathered as the previously ungathered, reclaimed as the abandoned, given the recognition they so long awaited, the poems in bound volumes appear both redeemed and revoked from their scenes or referents, from the history that the book, as book, omits.